Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to microprocessors and is of particular relevance to out of order processors with resources that are shared by multiple operations or processes.
Related Art
In such a scheme, various processors might share a resource by dividing its use temporally; a first process might be entrusted with a resource (by, e.g., a scheduler) at a first clock cycle and a second process might be entrusted with use of the resource at a later clock cycle. From time to time, a situation may arise when a process and/or operation requires multiple instances of a shared resource. Previously, the best way to address this situation has been by either adding additional instances of the shared resource to address this worst case scenario and/or changing the scheduling scheme in ways that negatively impacted processor function.